-- You didn't need it to play STO before. Why should you expend the extra computer resources now? Some of us (not me) play STO on a bare-bones laptop where extra processes like Arc really do affect the game.

-- Arc ****s with other overlays. Some of us use things like TeamSpeak for voice chat. I've seen at least one report of Arc ****ing up a heavily macro'd gaming mouse as well.

-- It's adware and spyware PWE is forcing on us because they want more players for their other games. Personally, STO is the only MMO I play and the only one I'm interested in playing, so PWE can go **** themselves. EDIT: I signed up for STO because I wanted to play a Star Trek space game and GOG.com doesn't have Starfleet Command or Bridge Commander.

-- Everything it does besides play PWE games other than STO, Steam already has for over a decade and does way better. Buying zen is quick and painless with Steam Wallet and works every time, whereas I can't count the number of problems I've seen people report with trying to buy zen through other channels.

Just so we're clear, I have a lot of the same objections (and others) to Steam and Origin and so forth. Steam in particular I refused to use for years because the client didn't have a download scheduler, meaning Team Fortress 2 often killed my family's data cap when I wasn't looking. We've gotten a better Internet connection since then so that's not an issue anymore, and Steam's ancillary services (especially one-button screenshotting) have proven very useful. And you cannot beat Steam's sale prices.

Origin ... well, I hate EA's business practices in general so I only added it after Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age II went on 50% off sale last Christmas. They're quite literally the only games I actually bought through Origin. (I have others in the client, but they came from other channels.) Plus, it doesn't have a built-in one-button screenshot function like Steam does (though you can work around that by booting Origin through Steam).

Can't thank you enough for this post.
I'm not one of those people who will let themselves
be spied on until they're little green crackers served on Tuesdays.
Hope it works.
Thanks.
(Scurries back into cave).

I have been running STO without ARC through the advice in this thread. Just use start icon from STO folder without booting ARC. Since S8 game will still start this way but crash to desktop every time I try to start a mission etc.
Not willing to play with pos ARC running in background. Any ideas why this is happening now, was fine in S7. Any fix?

I just uninstalled ARC completely and did a new install from Starswords sig link in the posts above mine. Guess there was a conflict.

Having cleaned all traces of ARC from my comp did a fresh install with the sig link and now all works fine again. 1/2 hour start to finish. TY Starsword. (I'm afraid our chinese overlords may not be pleased... ).

Hope you can help. The folders "Cryptic Studios" and after does not exist on this laptop I'm using even though I can get on STO with ARC. No matter what I do I can't find anything past PWE other than ARC related. Is there any way I can get all the folders?

Cryptic Studios or Star Trek Online should be on there somewhere, maybe it's in the Arc folder.
We'll see how things play out, I can only hope that they are not stupid enough to make it so that Arc needs to be running to play STO, if that happens that's it for PWE on my computer.

If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.